Art Spotlight: Bathroom

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs.

Hello Sketchfab viewers!

My name is Ally Albon and I have recently wandered into the professional world as a 3d modeller/texture/game artist. I started learning 3D a couple of years ago in my spare time while working in a completely different industry – my husband has worked all his life in games and I wanted to join in the fun – I should have done so years ago!

I thought I was going to be a concept artist, but 3d turned into a full blown passion and it is now the only career for me. Most recently I have become increasingly interested in hand-painted textures, combining a love of 2d art with the 3d realm.

I have a strong interest in being able to capture the mood and style of a piece of art, which came to fruition recently in the creation of my “bathroom” piece. The art of Paola Escobar is just mindblowing, and one piece in particular, I just had to try my hand at modelling. I wanted to see if it was possible to create both an interesting scene and capture the essence of Paola’s 2d art – essentially fooling the viewer into thinking perhaps they were still looking at a 2d image until they start moving around.

(Original Concept)

To begin the project, I imported the concept piece into 3d Studio max where I used flat planes to create silhouettes of the different shapes in the scene. Once I was happy, I then used a mixture of edge extrusions and box modelling to give depth to the objects. There was a bit of guesswork to this, but pushing and pulling got it there in the end. Because of the perspective, I had to adapt the shape and angle of some of the objects to try and mimic the concept as closely as possible.

A few props in 3d Studio Max

Finished scene in 3d Studio Max

I wanted to try a texture technique I had not used before, and that was to use a simple colour board where UVs would be placed to their corresponding swatch colour, rather than unwrapping and individually painting each object. It worked very well, and I will be using this technique again – everything could be further compressed and tidied up but I was very happy with the outcome and how quick the process could be. Space was left as I thought I might expand on the scene to add my own touches in the future.

Texture

I used Marmoset toolbag 1 throughout to get a quick view of the texturing progress – as the scene is essentially unlit, it was an accurate means to see how things were progressing. I knew it was time to call it done when I was asked which was the model and which was the concept!

The project was intended to be a “quick” model and all in all, took around 12 hours for modelling, uvs and texturing. I had such fun making it, and I hope to try the same techniques on more of Paola’s work in the future!

And just for fun: a lit version

Thank you to Sketchfab for creating such a great, innovative website that allows artists to present their work in the format they were meant to be seen in, and for visitors to gain an insight into modelling that could not be demonstrated any other way.